How to Switch from Addy.io to Emcognito: A Step-by-Step Migration Guide

Learning how to switch from addy.io to Emcognito comes down to running an alias-by-alias migration while updating login addresses across your active services. Because no automated cross-platform sync protocol exists between forwarding providers, you recreate aliases inside Emcognito and re-point the external accounts that matter rather than executing an automated bulk import. If you are already managing identities across distinct sites, this migration guide outlines how to handle the cutover systematically without losing inbound traffic.

Switching alias providers requires an honest assessment of capabilities. When moving to Emcognito, you gain unlimited aliases on every tier, native outbound composing from any alias on Plus and Pro, a documented developer API, and an inline Chrome browser extension for instant creation on signup forms. In exchange, you give up the self-hosting setup and open-source codebase of addy.io. Emcognito is closed source and runs only as a hosted service; if open source or self-hosting is a requirement, addy.io is the better fit. Pricing starts on annual billing with Emcognito Plus at $20 per year ($2 per month) and Emcognito Pro at $36 per year ($4 per month), giving you predictable forwarding headroom. Source: Emcognito source.

The Short Answer: What Switching Actually Involves

You already understand how alias routing protects your real inbox. Spam volume, data broker scraping, and credential stuffing are known realities, so the decision to migrate is purely operational. When executing an addy.io migration, there is no single button that repoints third-party senders on the web. Moving between services requires three core tasks:

• Auditing your current forwarders and prioritizing critical accounts over dormant ones.
• Minting replacement addresses inside Emcognito and verifying their delivery path.
• Updating your profile email addresses on destination services while running both providers in parallel.

An alias cutover is safe only when you treat it as an overlap rather than an abrupt shutoff. Keeping your existing forwarder active during the transition prevents lost password resets or dropped transactional updates. While your routine traffic continues to flow, you establish clean addresses in Emcognito. Emcognito is an email alias service: it creates durable, reply-capable forwarding addresses that deliver to your real inbox without revealing it. It is not a disposable, burner or temporary inbox. You can see the full architectural breakdown on the alias provider comparison page.

Before You Move: Decide Whether Emcognito Fits Your Setup

Most technical users evaluate switching alias providers for one of three reasons: they have hit alias creation walls on competing tiers, they want a standalone forwarding utility separated from a proprietary password manager or browser operating system, or they need a clean REST API to generate forwarders inside personal scripts and development workflows. Emcognito focuses exclusively on alias creation, logging, and routing.

However, Emcognito is not the right choice for every architecture. Emcognito is closed source and runs only as a hosted service; if open source or self-hosting is a requirement, addy.io is the better fit. Emcognito aliases use the shared emcognito.com domain. Custom subdomain support is planned, but custom domains are not available today. If an existing setup depends entirely on routing traffic through personal domains, migrating requires moving to a shared domain space.

Authentication on Emcognito is completely passwordless: you sign in via an emailed magic link. There is no master password to set, no proprietary desktop software to configure, and no walled-garden ecosystem to adopt. The table below outlines how Emcognito approaches alias forwarding compared to addy.io:

For an expanded point-by-point breakdown of architectural differences, read the detailed comparison on Emcognito vs addy.io.

Step 1: Inventory Your Addy.io Aliases and Rank Them

Before changing any accounts, perform an audit of your active forwarders. Export your alias records or review your dashboard by following the vendor's data export guide. In practice, long-term alias users accumulate dozens or hundreds of addresses, many of which belong to inactive projects, defunct newsletters, or stale online purchases. Attempting to move every single address on day one introduces unnecessary administrative friction.

Divide your existing list into three operational categories:

1. High-Value Tier: Primary financial institutions, utility providers, government portals, primary development platforms, and critical personal services. A missed notification or authentication message here carries tangible consequences. According to FTC phishing guidance, keeping strict control over your primary communication channels is critical for verifying legitimate organizational outreach and preventing identity takeover.
2. Medium-Value Tier: Active e-commerce accounts, regular subscription platforms, delivery services, and community forums. These accounts receive frequent transactional notices, receipts, and order updates, but a brief delivery hiccup is manageable.
3. Low-Value Tier: One-off software downloads, gated content submissions, temporary trials, and dormant discussion boards. These addresses rarely send necessary mail and often serve primarily as marketing capture points.

Focus your immediate migration effort on the high-value tier. The low-value tier often requires no migration at all: leave them running on your legacy provider until that account winds down, or abandon them entirely. Documenting where your contact information lives is essential; as noted in FTC guidance on how websites and apps collect and use information, tracking where you share your contact records helps isolate which platforms trade, monetize, or expose customer identities.

During this audit, note which addresses require bidirectional communication. If you frequently reply to inbound inquiries through a given alias, note that requirement. Furthermore, flag any addresses generated programmatically by internal scripts or background pipelines, as those will transition to the Emcognito developer API.

Step 2: Create the Emcognito Account and Pick a Plan

To begin, initiate registration at the Emcognito signup page. Enter your real destination email address to receive a secure sign-in magic link. No credit card is required to create a Free account.

Choose the tier that matches your monthly forwarding volume and functional needs from the Emcognito pricing page:

• Emcognito Free: Includes unlimited anonymous email aliases, a monthly cap of 100 forwarded messages (referral bonuses can raise this allowance to at most 200 per month), and no credit card requirement. Forwarded messages carry a small, clearly-labelled sponsor card at the bottom of the email.
• Emcognito Plus: $20 per year (or $2 per month), as documented on the pricing table. Provides 2,500 forwarded messages per month, the ability to compose brand-new mail from any alias, removes the sponsor card entirely, and provides developer API access capped at 50 created aliases per day.
• Emcognito Pro: $36 per year (or $4 per month), as documented on the pricing table. Provides 15,000 forwarded messages per month, a higher daily compose limit, developer API access capped at 200 created aliases per day, and represents the best annual value at three months free compared to monthly billing.

Both Plus and Pro plans come with a 7-day free trial on either annual or monthly terms. You supply payment details during checkout, but your card is not charged until the 7-day window concludes.

Metered quotas in Emcognito apply strictly to forwarded and composed mail, not to the number of aliases you hold. Every plan, including Free, supports an unlimited total number of stored aliases. However, creating new aliases carries a daily ceiling to prevent infrastructure abuse: all accounts can create up to 200 aliases per day through the web dashboard (Free included), while API-driven creation is capped at 50 per day on Plus and 200 per day on Pro.

Step 3: Recreate Aliases and Update the Sites That Matter

With your account active, begin recreating your priority forwarders inside the Emcognito dashboard. Because each service receives a distinct address, your forwarding structure remains isolated per site.

Generate a new alias for your first high-value provider. Log into that provider's settings, locate the profile or security preferences, and update your registered email address to the new Emcognito address. Most platforms will trigger a verification message containing a confirmation link or one-time numeric passcode. Check your real destination inbox to confirm the forwarded message arrives cleanly, click the verification link, and finalize the change.

When you encounter new signups or account forms throughout your workday, use the official Emcognito Chrome browser extension. The extension detects email input fields inline, allowing you to generate and insert a new alias directly into the webpage without switching over to the dashboard tab.

If you encounter an online service that restricts email updates or requires an extensive manual identity verification process, leave the existing addy.io alias active. You do not need to force an immediate cutover. Let that legacy address forward traffic while you migrate easier accounts.

Any alias inside Emcognito can be paused with one click using the "Pause alias" button in the dashboard, cutting off inbound senders instantly. Deleting an alias requires confirming a security prompt. Because every site uses an isolated alias, any sudden influx of unsolicited messages immediately reveals which external vendor compromised your data.

What Changes About Replying After You Switch

Inbound forwarding is only half of the communication workflow; maintaining identity protection when responding to messages is equally vital. Research demonstrates how indispensable messaging remains across digital operations; for instance, Pew Research Center research on email use underscores email's enduring role as a primary transactional and professional tool. Replying through an alias operates under strict technical rules depending on your active plan.

On Plus and Pro you can hit Reply in your own mail app (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail) on a forwarded message, and Emcognito sends the reply from the alias. It is accepted only from the mailbox you sign in with, and each reply uses one monthly send. For security and routing authenticity, mail forwarded before October 5, 2026 has no reply address. The system requires that inbound mail originating from your client passes Sender Policy Framework (SPF) checks and carries an aligned DKIM signature matching your registered destination address. If a third party attempts to send mail to that reply route, or if you attempt to reply from an unregistered secondary mailbox, the message is discarded.

Reply securely in the delivery log is included on every Emcognito plan until November 3, 2026, and on Plus and Pro from then on. Replying from your own mail app is a Plus and Pro feature. If an account on the Free plan attempts to reply directly using a desktop or mobile mail app, the reply is rejected and returns an upgrade notice. Paid tiers can also review message logs in the dashboard and use "Reply securely" to dispatch answers for log entries received within the prior 7 days. You can review the precise configuration on the guide to replying from your alias.

Paid tiers also provide outbound origination via the compose from alias engine. This allows you to draft and dispatch a completely new email directly from any alias you hold, even if the recipient has never messaged you before. Composing is enabled from the start of the 7-day free trial. However, composing features daily limits to protect sender reputation: accounts on Plus can compose up to 20 messages per day, while Pro accounts can compose up to 100 messages per day, ramping up progressively during the first seven days of the account. Reaching the daily compose limit does not stop inbound message forwarding. However, every composed outbound message draws from the same monthly quota shared with inbound forwarding.

Moving Aliases You Created From Code: The Developer API

If you automated alias creation in your addy.io workflow using scripts or application hooks, you will need to point those integrations to Emcognito's API endpoints. The Emcognito REST API is accessible on both the Plus and Pro plans.

The API surface is intentional and minimal. Version 1 provides exactly two endpoints:

• GET /v1/aliases: Lists account aliases, supporting pagination via next_cursor and last_key query parameters.
• According to the Emcognito API documentation, POST /v1/aliases generates a new alias and accepts optional JSON attributes including label, note, source, category, single_use, and expires_at.

The API base URL is strictly https://api.emcognito.com/v1 (there is no /api/v1 route). Authentication uses an HTTP header formatted as Authorization: Bearer <key>. Your key consists of the literal prefix emk_ followed by 43 URL-safe characters. There is no distinction between live and test keys.

When you create an alias, the endpoint returns an HTTP 200 status code (not 201). The created_at timestamp is returned as an integer Unix epoch rather than an ISO-8601 string, and empty string properties are returned as "" rather than null.

Here is an example request creating an alias via cURL:

curl -X POST https://api.emcognito.com/v1/aliases \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer emk_your_key_1234567890abcdefghijklmnopqrstuv" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "label": "Staging Server Alerts",
    "note": "Migration batch 1",
    "source": "migration_script"
  }'

And the expected HTTP 200 response structure:

{
  "alias": {
    "id": "9f83a21b",
    "address": "k8j2x9m4p@emcognito.com",
    "status": "active",
    "created_at": 1775000000,
    "forward_count": 0,
    "label": "Staging Server Alerts",
    "note": "Migration batch 1",
    "source": "migration_script",
    "category": "",
    "single_use": false,
    "expires_at": 0
  }
}

POST /v1/aliases returns HTTP 200 with the new alias under "alias". The burst limit is 60 requests a minute per key; its 429 carries a Retry-After header giving the seconds until the window resets. The daily alias-creation cap (50 on Plus, 200 on Pro) resets at 00:00 UTC and its 429 carries no Retry-After. Emcognito sends no X-RateLimit-* headers. v1 of the Emcognito API creates and lists aliases (GET and POST /v1/aliases). Suspending, resuming and deleting an alias are one-click dashboard actions today; there is no PATCH or DELETE endpoint yet.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I export and import aliases automatically between addy.io and Emcognito?

No automated sync protocol exists between the two providers. Because routing domains and internal IDs are vendor-specific, migration requires minting fresh aliases in Emcognito and updating the corresponding login address on each external service. Running both services in parallel during the cutover prevents dropped messages while you transfer accounts.

Can you bring an existing custom domain?

Emcognito aliases use the shared emcognito.com domain. Custom subdomain support is planned, but custom domains are not available today. If an existing setup depends entirely on personal domain routing, addy.io is the better fit.

How does replying to forwarded emails work on Emcognito?

On Plus and Pro you can hit Reply in your own mail app (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail) on a forwarded message, and Emcognito sends the reply from the alias. It is accepted only from the mailbox you sign in with, and each reply uses one monthly send. On Free, replying from your mail app is a Plus feature; Free accounts can reply from the delivery log with Reply securely until November 3, 2026, after which Reply securely is Plus and Pro only.

Can I pause or delete aliases through the developer API?

v1 of the Emcognito API creates and lists aliases (GET and POST /v1/aliases). Suspending, resuming and deleting an alias are one-click dashboard actions today; there is no PATCH or DELETE endpoint yet.

What happens if I reach my monthly forwarding cap?

Monthly allowances track forwarded and composed emails, not the number of aliases you hold. Stored aliases remain unlimited on all tiers. If you reach the monthly cap on Free (100 forwards/month), Plus (2,500 forwards/month), or Pro (15,000 forwards/month), additional incoming messages are held briefly until your quota refreshes or until you upgrade your plan.

Next Step: Setting Up Your Cutover

If you need to start conversations directly from your forwarding addresses rather than only receiving inbound mail, review the yearly plans on the Emcognito pricing page. Emcognito Plus ($20 per year) and Emcognito Pro ($36 per year) unlock outbound mail composition from any alias, direct email app replies, and developer API access with a 7-day free trial.